U.S. Pat. No. 7,138,257 discloses method for producing ethanol by using corn flours. U.S. Pat. No. 7,074,603 discloses process for producing ethanol from corn dry milling.
Traditional technology utilizes industrial enzymes to decompose high-molecular-weight carbohydrate into small molecules (for producing ethanol in a fermentor) in the first bioreactor step. This process requires tremendous amount of industrial enzymes which is very expensive. These enzymes are sensitive to environmental changes which will increase the processing cost and decrease the enzyme activity and ethanol production rate.
Pretreatment of the raw material (cereals) includes wet mill and dry mill. Wet mill is performed by placing cereals in water, incubating with H2SO4 at pH 5.8 for 48 hours, neutralizing with bases, and then applying lots of industrial enzymes to decompose cereals into oligosaccharide. This procedure increases the handling cost of raw material processing and environmental pollution. Cereals for dry mill treatment need to be ground into finer particles for enzymatic reaction which increases the difficulty of material processing. Also, high heat generated during the grinding process may react with cereals and generate toxic substances easily.
Fermentation broth needs to be taken out for sterilization before placing it into ethanol fermentor. This non-continuous handling step adds extra cost because of operation risk and manpower.
Take corn as an example, it requires six steps to generate corn flours. More energy input is involved as well as less raw material is recovered due to multiple steps. Therefore, production rate is decreasing and cost is increasing.
Traditional technology utilizes economic crops as raw material, such as rice starch, corn starch, or starch from other economic crops which increases the manufacturing cost.
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